page_title: Vale Royal Abbey
section_title: Relations with tenants
hierarchical_section_title: Vale Royal Abbey / Construction / Relations with tenants
caption_attribution_description: English: Round Tower Lodge, Sandiway, Cheshire. The tower was part of Vale Royal estate, but has been stranded in the central reservation of the A556 road when this was built in the 1930s.
context_page_description: Vale Royal Abbey is a former medieval abbey and later country house in Whitegate England. The precise location and boundaries of the abbey are difficult to determine in today's landscape. The original building was founded c. 1270 by the Lord Edward, later Edward I for Cistercian monks. Edward had supposedly taken a vow during a rough sea crossing in the 1260s. Civil wars and political upheaval delayed the build until 1272, the year he inherited the throne. The original site at Darnhall was unsatisfactory, so was moved a few miles north to the Delamere Forest. Edward intended the structure to be on a grand scale—had it been completed it would have been the largest Cistercian monastery in the country—but his ambitions were frustrated by recurring financial difficulties.
  Early during construction, England became involved in war with Wales. As the treasury was thus in need of resources, Vale Royal lost all of its grants, skilled masons and builders. When work resumed in the late 14th century, the building was considerably smaller than originally planned. The project encountered other problems.
context_section_description: In addition to the burden of trying to finish the abbey buildings, Vale Royal faced other serious problems. As the medievalists Gwilym Dodd and Alison McHardy have emphasised, "a religious house, like any other landlord, depended on the income from its estates as the main source of its economic wellbeing", and from the late 12th century, monastic institutions were "particularly assiduous in...seeking to tighten the legal definition of servile status and tenure" for its tenantry. From its foundation, Vale Royal was no exception, and the monks' relationship with their tenants and neighbours soon deteriorated and remained usually poor. The abbey was resented by the people of Darnhall and Over, who found themselves under its feudal lordship. This made the previously free tenants villeins. Tenants of Darnhall attempted to withdraw from paying the abbot in 1275 (only a year after the abbey's foundation), and continued to feud with Vale Royal's abbots over the next fifty years. The dispute was mainly caused by forestry rights; the new abbey was in the forest of Mondrem, which had been mostly common land until it was granted to the abbey. Keeping it common land would have prevented the monks from utilising it, so the abbey effectively received immunity from the foresting laws, and, say Bostock and Hogg, "almost certainly" over-reached itself regularly.
  Abbots were also feudal lords, and not necessarily sympathetic landlords because of their ecclesiastical position; when their tenants appeared before the abbot's manorial court, they appeared before a judge and common law applied. The abbots may have been oppressive landlords, with the people responding fiercely to what historian Richard Hilton called a form of "social degradation". With a generally uncertain income, and massive outgoings, the monks may have had to be harsh landlords, although they apparently undertook their duties as landlords with zeal. Scholars are uncertain as to whether the abbey was as harsh a landlord as the villagers claimed. Previous landlords, such as the earls of Chester, may have been lax in their enforcement of serfdom, and so Darnhall and Over probably became accustomed to their relative freedom. Alternatively, the monks may have been lax in enforcement feudal laws, leading the villagers of Darnhall and its surrounding area to take advantage of them. The villagers prosecuted their struggle in earnest, sometimes in law and sometimes with violence. They attacked monastic officials a number of times; a monk was attacked and a servant killed while collecting tithes in Darnhall in 1320 (under Abbot Richard of Evesham), and Abbot Peter was killed in 1339 while defending the abbey. They made multiple approaches to both the King and Queen—often travelling great distances to do so—but to no avail.
caption: The Round Tower Lodge is situated in the central reservation of the A556 road in Sandiway. All that survives of Vale Royal Abbey's gate lodge, the road was built around it in the 1930s. It is a Grade II listed building.
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